Kristi Noem won't sign bill banning biological boys from girls' sports
South Dakota governor joins 'Tucker Carlson Tonight' to explain the NCAA's role in her decision
Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem is facing intense backlash from the right over her recent decision not to enact a bill regarding transgender athletes that she previously vowed to sign into law.
Noem, who has repeatedly been floated as a potential 2024 White House contender, may be putting her political aspirations in jeopardy after she sent the Women's Fairness in Sports bill back to state legislators.
The bill, which is intended to ban biological males from competing in girls' sports at public schools, was championed by the governor earlier this month while she commemorated International Women's Day.
"I'm excited to sign this bill very soon," Noem tweeted on March 8.
However, critics are accusing Noem of "caving" to corporate interests after the NCAA and companies like Amazon issued threats of retaliation against South Dakota if the bill was signed into law.
On Monday, Noem rejected that notion, telling Fox News' Tucker Carlson that she merely requested revisions be made to the bill. She insisted that the bill as written would be challenged in court and that the state would "likely lose" those cases, citing "legal scholars" she had consulted with. Noem also talked up plans to build a "coalition" of states to combat the NCAA.
"I did a 'style and form' revision and asked the legislature to change it so that I can win," the governor said. "I'm not interested in picking a fight we can't win."
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Noem's defense was further criticized by conservatives, to the point that it prompted a response from her office.
"Apparently, uninformed cancel culture is fine when the right is eating their own," Noem communications director Ian Fury said on Tuesday. "A less impassioned review of the facts tells a much different story. Governor Noem has long stood for fairness in women’s sports."
Her office added, "If conservative media would take [five] seconds to read past the knee-jerk headlines and actually understand Governor Noem’s position, they’d come to a very different realization."
The conservative digital magazine The Federalist offered a blistering response on Wednesday, telling Noem, "Criticizing cowardly politicians isn't 'cancel culture,' it's democracy."
"Instead of coming to terms with the fact that Noem’s conservative base is furious with her recent backtracking and sudden lack of eagerness to sign the important bill, the governor’s office maintains that the most 'strategic' way to confront the legislation is to avoid 'waging a losing battle with the NCAA,'" Federalist staff writer Jordan Davidson wrote. "Her attempts to pretend that she resisted 'tremendous pressure from corporate bigwigs and the radical left alike to veto the bill' continue to fall short as more evidence that her inner circle ... heavily influenced her decision to abandon this culture war fight."
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Davidson highlighted Noem's chief of staff Tony Venhuizen, a board member of the Sioux Falls Chamber of Commerce. Another adviser, Matt McCaulley, is a lobbyist whose clients include the owners of the Sanford Sports Complex, which has reportedly sought to host NCAA tournaments.
"Noem is not at risk of getting 'canceled,' she’s merely experiencing the consequences of having [an] ideologically-driven voter base that knows caving in the face of corporate pressure makes you a worthless standard-bearer," Davidson continued. "The worst part, however, is that Noem is refusing to own up to her mistake. She’s hiding behind fake campaigns to promote fairness in women’s sports when she could simply sign the bill that would accomplish just that."
She added, "Her office is also refusing to release the names of the legal experts that she claims to have based her decision around, masking exactly who continues to advise her contrary to what her own state’s legislature, informed by named legal experts, suggested."
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However, not every conservative media outlet bashed the governor. RedState targeted Noem's critics as "doctrinaire purists" who are "attempting to swallow an apple whole rather than consume it in several bites" while disregarding "economic damage" and legal challenges as "valid reasons" to reevaluate the bill's language.
"The people criticizing Noem seem to think the only two outcomes here were to have the statute as written or to have no statute at all. That is mindless group-think," wrote RedState contributor Shipwreckedcrew. The option is to have a badly written statute that draws the ire of the NCAA and likely falls to a legal challenge from the ACLU. The alternate is a rewritten statute that the NCAA may ignore since it doesn’t directly affect college sports and has much simpler language that improves its chances of surviving a court challenge and doesn’t get school districts sued all over the state."
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